Italy’s Economic Suicide Movement

An estimated one million people poured into the streets of Rome on Saturday to protest Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s modest efforts to reform Italy’s notoriously labyrinthine labor laws. Led by the country’s largest union, the Italian General Confederation of Labor, or CGIL, the activists want to preserve Italy’s job guarantees as they are. Call it Italy’s economic suicide movement.

Italy’s labor-market rules have remained largely unreformed since the modern Italian state was established. Spread over some 2,700 pages, the...